Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th 1887 (IA b30475958).pdf/14

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no critic, and wrote very bad Latin. We are, however, now in a position to judge of this for ourselves from the real autograph. The Greek words scattered freely through the lectures are well written and spelt, though in one or more instances the first part of a word begins in Greek and finishes in English characters. But this is only on a par with the whole work, which is a cento of Greek, Latin, and English, never intended to be seen by any eye besides that of the writer himself. Yet even thus in passages it rises almost to eloquence, as in p. 47, where, speaking of the maintenance of human species by generation, in spite of the death of the individual, he says:

By the string tyed to eternity. Unde cum natura non potuit Individualem seternitatem, id quod potuit harum partium facultate speciem asternitatis generando sibi similem in secula. Unde sacris literis greatest blessing Issue, that thy seed shall remayne for ever.

And farther on:

Apparet item maribus et fceminis qui moderate utuntur never more brave, sprightly, blith, valiant, pleasant, or bewtifull.

which cannot fail to remind us of the passage in the fourth Georgic of his favourite author Virgil: